Millicent Fenwick Quotes

“We must have government, but we must watch them like a hawk.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“When you're old, everything you do is sort of a miracle.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“Everyone in America seems to be joining an organization of some kind, and in Congress one hears from them all.”

— Millicent Fenwick

I would like to see ... an entirely different procedure which is that we vote on the budget and decide how much we are going to spend, first, the way any family does, and then fit our priorities into what we think we have to spend. Instead, what we do, is to do it incrementally, starting at the bottom, adding and adding and adding ... Until we get the support of all the authorities in this House to decide, first, what we think this country can afford and then decide where the amount is going to be allocated, we will never have common sense in this House.

— Millicent Fenwick

Economics is not a science, in the sense that a policy can be repeatedly applied under similar conditions and will repeatedly produce similar results.

— Millicent Fenwick

“Good behavior is everybody's business, and good taste can be everyone's goal.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“The only people who would be in government are those who care more about people than they do about power.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“We simply cannot continue to live with a [tax] system which has so many inequities. It must be changed in such a way that each of us pays a fair share of the burden. It has been said that one man's loophole is another man's livelihood. Even if this is true, it certainly is not fair, because the loophole-livelihood of those who are reaping undeserved benefits can be the economic noose of those who are paying more than they should.”

— Millicent Fenwick

Party organization matters. When the door of a smoke-filled room is closed, there's hardly ever a woman inside.

— Millicent Fenwick

“What we do stems directly from what we believe.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“You may never reach a solution, but you're never absolved from the responsibility of trying.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“Never feel self-pity, the most destructive emotion there is. How awful to caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“The money that is spent in elections is absolutely unconscionable - even if it's private money. It's true that one's not corrupted by the expenditure of one's own money, but to some extent the system is. We cannot have a system in which the only people you can count on for a vote that doesn't look as though it might be a vote for a special-interest group are people with enormous fortunes.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“Women are on the outside when the door to the smoke-filled room is closed.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“When two working people decide to marry, their federal income tax is usually increased. As soon as one spouse earns at least 20 percent of a married couple's total income, the couple pays a 'marriage tax.' ... The United States is the only major industrialized nation in the free world in which the tax cost of the second [married] earner's entry into the work force is higher than that of the first. On one hand, our government's social policy is to help working women earn equal salaries to those of men, but on the other we have a tax structure that penalizes them when they do so.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“The essence of good taste is a sense of values, and a sense of values is the pivotal point of good living.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“There is hardly a facet of life that is now free of some sort of federal action.”

— Millicent Fenwick

Like life and people, it is full of paradoxes. Etiquette is based on tradition, and yet it can change. Its ramifications are trivialities, but its roots are in great principles.

— Millicent Fenwick

“The curious fascination in this job [U.S. representative] is the illusion that either you are being useful or you could be
and that's so tempting.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“You give bureaucrats power over others, and when the others are poor and helpless, nothing matches government. More than any single exploitive tyrannical force, the possibility of what government can do is absolutely terrifying.”

— Millicent Fenwick

Influence comes out of the work that you've done and the things you've stood for. Influence and power shouldn't be given to just anybody who wants them.

— Millicent Fenwick

“If there is one thing the past years have taught us, it is the importance of a keen and high sense of honor in those who handle our governmental affairs.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“A code of behavior is an inevitable part of life in any community, and if we hadn't inherited ours, we should have had to invent one.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“Any change in customs ... takes generations to accomplish, and must come about by general consent. Even a superficial study of sociology shows the futility of past efforts to make a lasting change in manners by an act of will or authority.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“One of the keys to our present definition of good taste is that it is better to be kind than to be 'correct.' There is no situation in which it is smart to be nasty.”

— Millicent Fenwick

In our times, significantly, the three outstanding voices against violence have been silenced by murder - Mahatma Gandhi in India, Archbishop Romero in El Salvador, and Dr. Martin Luther King, here at home.

— Millicent Fenwick

“The business of government is justice.”

— Millicent Fenwick

I have come to believe that one thing people cannot bear is a sense of injustice. Poverty, cold, even hunger are more bearable than injustice.

— Millicent Fenwick

“Wherever injustice occurs, we all need to be concerned.”

— Millicent Fenwick

“In my opinion it is a grave error for women to feel that they must move only in women's interests ... What, after all, would we think if men all got together and kept doing things that were supposed to be in the interest of men?”

— Millicent Fenwick